Countless?

Vigilantism, journalism and the production of lynchings in an Amazonian metropolis

Abstract

Based on the study of lynchings reported between 2011 and 2020 and the ethnography of “security” on the streets of Manaus, the article perfects a new theoretical key. The micropolitical analysis of reports not only suggests an increase in cases and new regularities (which differ from studies from previous decades in Brazil) but also demonstrates the participation of journalism in the discursive assemblage of lynchings. Ethnography, in turn, shows the existence of diffuse vigilantism. In view of this, we propose an analysis of the articulation of two devices in the production of the unaccountability of lynchings, that is, of the forces that make this phenomenon something not countable – in the double meaning of the term.